Staff of Fiji National Provident Fund Member Benefit Department collect rubbish as part of their corporate responsibility.
The National Dengue Clean-Up campaign received another good public support today with more than 1000 people cleaning various targeted areas in Suva and Nausori.
National Dengue Taskforce coordinator,Joana Koroituinakelo said there was a good turn-out of community as well as government representatives.
“We started off early in the morning targeting areas such as Jittu Estate, Lakeba street, Khalsa road, Bureta street and the Suva foreshore where civil servants from government departments, youth groups and business community participated in the Clean Up. We urged the residential owners to regularly clean their compounds and corporate bodies to join hands in combating the rise in dengue cases,” Mrs Nakelo said.
“In this Clean-Up, the focus was mainly on the search and removal of items such as empty drums, unused tyres, empty unused containers, coconut shells and manmade objects capable of holding clean fresh water in them. These objects in compounds are responsible for breeding the mosquito vector that spreads the dengue fever.
“We removed these items from the compounds and placed them on the roadside for collection by the responsible local authorities.”
Senior Health Inspector, Suva City Council, Mr Naresh Narayan said it was good to see corporate bodies and communities also joining in the Clean-Up.
“A lot of white goods were collected and residents can still contact the council if they want their white goods such as discarded electrical goods to be collected. There were a lot of old tyres and Ministry of Health provided us with cutters to shred the tyres before taking it to the Naboro landfill,” Mr Narayan said.
Organised by the Ministry of Health the National clean-up campaign was also carried out in the, Western, Northern and Eastern Division.
Despite vigorous public awareness programs through mass media (TV, Radio & Local dailies) and community visitation outreach by health personnel’s, dengue cases continue climb and this basically indicates the strong presence of dengue mosquito in our midst that are transmitting the virus around.
From the public health perspective, ongoing surveillance has revealed two critical findings:
1. Most current dengue vector breeding sites are located in industrial areas
2. Drums and tyres found to be the most preferred breeding objects compared to other manmade renowned objects equally favourable for mosquito breeding.
Therefore, the health surveillance team has emphasised special attention and focus in the destruction of drums and tyres in this nationwide campaign.
An effective clean-up campaign will certainly reduce the population of mosquitoes that carry the dengue fever virus.
MINFO